First Victim of Anti-Piracy Effort Is...The Media?

Oddly enough, one of the first victims in the hunt to track down illegally copied software was the media. The Software & Information Industry Association, the principal trade association for the software and content industry, on Thursday announced its...

Oddly enough, one of the first victims in the hunt to track down illegally copied software was the media.

The Software & Information Industry Association, the principal trade association for the software and content industry, on Thursday announced its first settlement in its Corporate Content Anti-Piracy Program. The defendant? Knowledge Networks, a marketing consultancy. The victims? The Associated Press, UPI, and publisher Reed Elsevier, among others.

Most often, the SIIA is considered to be a software trade industry organization, the complement to the BSA, which has won fame for offering million-dollar bounties for tipsters reporting software use without the required licenses. An anonymous tipster received a much more modest $6,000 for reporting Knowledge Networks' infringement, while the company settled for $300,000 with the SIIA.

It's interesting, though, what "infringement" means in this day and age.

Media companies like Ziff-Davis have reprints departments, where, for a small fee, companies can reprint ZD articles for their own purposes. This really isn't rocket science, and has been going on for some time. It's why we ask bloggers to reprint just a quote or a paragraph or two. Anything more is plagiarism.

"Knowledge Networks is a reputable company that made a very costly mistake," said SIIA Litigation Counsel Scott Bain, according to the SIIA report (updated link). "We are pleased with the settlement and hope that it alerts other users of copyrighted content such as newspaper articles, magazine articles, newsletters, newswire services and financial reports to the importance of securing proper licenses, even for internal copying and distribution."

Here's a better quote: "Sooner or later, companies that pirate content are going to get caught," said Keith Kupferschmid, SVP of Intellectual Property Policy & Enforcement. "That's when they discover that their choice -- which they thought would cut expenses -- has ended up as a very costly business decision." It's one of the few times I've seen this angle: that copying a wire service report is pirating content.

Which is why, honestly, that a company founded by two Stanford professors would have done something like that. While the plagiarism waters have been significantly muddied by blogging (paraphrasing of entire articles is unfortunately commonplace now), copying academic papers is a huge no-no.

Ironically, though, one could argue that the practice was begun by wire services themselves, as they occasionally report that a paper like The Wall Street Journal reported XYZ in their morning edition, for example. The wire services, to their credit, however, often try to follow up the original report with their own content.

One wonders if UPI is going to start suing consumers? Somehow I doubt it.